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REDUCE DEMAND & RE-USE / RECYCLE WATER

There is no substitute for water.

Not only is clean freshwater vital for life itself, it’s also essential for most industrial production processes. We need it to drink, cook, wash our clothes, stay clean and healthy, flush away our waste and grow our food. Without it, our homes, businesses, factories, hospitals, towns and cities would grind to a complete standstill. Quite simply: we need water to survive

So why do we take it for granted?

It’s time for us to realise that water doesn’t just magically pour out of a tap when it’s opened. It doesn’t just fall from the sky whenever we happen to need it. Our freshwater resources and infrastructure are precious and need to be protected, conserved and managed well to ensure sufficient supply for ourselves and future generations.

In South Africa, an already water-stressed country, this is particularly important, especially as global climate change impacts on our weather patterns, causing more frequent and severe droughts, storms and water shortages.

We’ve reached a watershed* moment – a point in time when each of us needs to change their relationship with water, realising that it’s scarce, vital and precious, and deserves our utmost respect and care. By being conscious of our water consumption and making small but significant changes in the way we use it we can make a huge difference.

A drought does not necessarily mean there is no rain, but rather that there is below average rainfall. In when years, there is above average rainfall. As a means of balancing this fluctuation we use water storage schemes such as dams and reservoirs to store water during wet seasons for use during dry seasons. However, as being experienced in the Western Cape, the prolonged dry season, drought, has resulted in dams not being replenished and the demand for water is drawing the dams down to very low levels.

The Watershed Project aims to raise public awareness about water as a scarce and precious natural resource in innovative and engaging ways by organising film screenings and events that allow ordinary South Africans to engage with all things water.

*(In geography, a watershed is an elevated area of land that separates waters flowing into different streams, rivers, basins, lakes or oceans)